TIt is a sick country that is getting sicker. It will take years for the NHS waits to be resolved, if at all. While people wait, they get sicker. As more and more people end up in absolute poverty – a fifth of people now – they become even sicker. As they get older, they get sicker, and that peak has not yet been reached. Every part of the NHS feels on the edge, especially because, amazingly, that’s just what they’re doing, even with no end in sight to the stress.
NHS data released last week on people waiting more than 18 weeks with serious heart problems shows some are likely to die before receiving treatment. If waiting patients have a heart attack or stroke, they call an ambulance. So there is one an astonishing 7% increase in those Category 1 calls, says Saoirse Mallorie, senior analyst at the Kings Fund.
I listened to these types of calls at the South East Coast Ambulance Service reporting center in Gillingham, north Kent, which covers Surrey, Sussex and Kent. I sat with D, a seasoned and sympathetic emergency medical advisor, conversation handler and life and death decision maker.
Coincidentally, the first call comes from one of those acute heart patients. Mr. Yes, he is conscious, but his chest pain is severe. Does he have a GTN spray (for chest pain relief)? Put it under his tongue. Yes, he has experienced this before, a familiar, very sharp pain. He’s in their system and is another emergency. He is told: “There is currently a wait time of 22 minutes in your region.” Ambulance times are improving, but still missing their targets.
Mrs. Y, bedridden, 72 years old, has a nurse who came to her side first, and is alarmed that her blood gases have sunk dangerously low. She needs an ambulance and a stretcher, but no, she doesn’t have a family member accompanying her. The nurse waits for the ambulance, but any delay will also delay her next patient.
Then a call comes from J, who called recently. She is trying to commit suicide, overdosed, many pills, she says in a low and hoarse voice, asking where the ambulance she called earlier is. Notes show that they took her to the hospital three days ago after another attempt. He noted which pills she had taken: they were anti-allergy, and for diabetes. “I have severe chest pain now,” she says. Like a thunderclap, D asks? Yes, she says, and that immediately promotes her to category 2: urgent. The notes also show that she calls often, lives alone, is desperate and needs something that isn’t there. Only the NHS is there. An ambulance is on its way.
D says that J needs a loneliness service, because he often hears this need in his earpiece: loneliness is a cause of illness, and those with the least are the loneliest. This is a lovely new hotline with an atmosphere of camaraderie, but 24% of posts are vacant as it is difficult to recruit people for this invaluable but sometimes unsettling job with a starting salary of £24,228, especially in the expensive south of England . Verbal abuse of staff is common from desperate people waiting for ambulances to arrive. It was not entirely a condition of my visit that I emphasize how much they need new recruits and how rewarding they find the job. D certainly appreciated it, and callers who got on the phone would find him reassuring in a crisis.
No one in healthcare doubts that the country is sicker now. Ambulances and emergency departments no longer receive unfounded calls. When the latest NHS figures were published, the national medical director said, Sir Stephen Powis, talked about “There is a huge demand for services, with more people visiting A&E last year than ever before, over a million more than before the pandemic.” But Minister of Health Victoria Atkins on X trumpeted: “This is the biggest five-month decline in more than a decade, excluding the pandemic.” Only truthful.
The shine comes off when you realize that, like the Health Service Journal notes that the decline appears to be entirely explained by removal The pediatric community awaits a less visible list elsewhere, and the Health Service Journal found that more than a thousand of these patients had waited more than 78 weeks. The Office for National Statistics also reports that current figures may be missing another 2 million people.
Former Health Secretary Lord Bethell said on Times Radio about Britain’s overall health care: “We are the second worst in the G7. We need to tackle the fundamental reasons why so many millions of people in Britain carry so many diseases.” Yes indeed. But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently said, with a huge cut to disability benefits in his 2025 fantasy budget: “Do I think our country is three times sicker than it was ten years ago? The answer is no.” However, ask any corner of the NHS and the answer is yes. The DWP’s own forecasts expect the number of disability and illness claims to rise by almost 2 million in five years – and their working capacity is being put to the test. Today the Health Foundation released an alarming report warning that an additional 700,000 people of working age will be diagnosed with a serious illness by 2040, and that 80% of them will be in deprived areas. , which “will cause major health inequalities.”
The diseases of despair, self-harm, suicide attempts and addiction are common to all diseases misery of deprivation and deprivationwhere the poorest 20% have twice as many mental health problems, and mentally ill people use emergency services four times more than people with physical disabilities, NHS data analysts told me this week.
There was a time – it seems like ages ago now – when Labor was a mile behind in the polls and when any bad news for the government, economic or social, was a reason to celebrate (secretly) and hope for worse . Now that the mantle is about to be passed to them and this scorched earth, this legacy of doom will no longer be theirs. The social destruction of austerity has created a health deficit that may be harder to shift than the national debt. Labor people admit it may take more than one term to restore the NHS to its peak state of 2010, when it recorded the shortest waiting times and highest satisfaction. How much will they spend? Waiting is the only sensible answer.
Here’s a lesson the Tories must learn from their failures: short-term cuts that increase hardship and poverty only put impossible pressure on the NHS, also raising expectations for Tory voters and causing them to lose elections.